Helmut Nickel

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Manfred Sachse (left) and Helmut Nickel (photo 1985)

Helmut Nickel (born March 24, 1924 in Quohren near Dresden ; † June 5, 2019 in Naples , Florida ) was a German art historian , weapons historian , and comic artist and author. As a draftsman and author of various series, he had a significant impact on German comics in the 1950s.

life and work

Helmut Nickel in Erlangen at the Comic Salon 2012

Nickel, who already liked to draw as a child, wanted to study veterinary medicine after graduating from high school , but was drafted . He was taken prisoner of war as a soldier in Belgium , where he says he got into professional drawing when the camp commandant was looking for a poster painter for his father-in-law's cinema and discovered a drawing that Nickel had made for a fellow prisoner. After his release he was not allowed to study as a "commoner" in the Soviet occupation zone . In 1948, Nickel moved to West Berlin and enrolled at the Free University of Art History and Ethnology that had recently been founded there .

To finance his studies, Nickel worked in an advertising agency. On the side he created his first comic: the comic version of the classic The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas . This was published by Gerstmayer Verlag . The activity as a comic artist was introduced to him by a colleague who worked as a font painter for the same advertising agency as Nickel. Further works at that time were the Don Pedro , a second series by Hot Jerry , which he also published under the pseudonym Hugh J. Haffspoke, which he had completely designed and published under the pseudonym H. Humbert, the science fiction series Titanus , the was taken over after three issues by Hansrudi Wäscher , and Robinson , which he took over from Willi Kohlhoff . While Kohlhoff was very much based on Daniel Defoe's template , Nickel turned his protagonist into a world traveler, whose ship journeys took 82 booklets to various exotic locations. In addition, Francis Drake, the Queen's Corsair, and Peter's strange journeys for Walter Lehning Verlag were also among Nickel's works. In the latter, he initially let his protagonist meet the characters from Hansrudi Wäscher's universe.

In 1959, Nickel got a time-consuming job as a research assistant in a Berlin museum, which did not allow him any further secondary employment. After being considered an expert due to his dissertation ( The Medieval Riding Shield of the Occident , FU Berlin, 1958), Nickel successfully applied for a position at the New York Metropolitan Museum as curator of the historical weapons collection. Because he again gave this job more time freedom, he took the opportunity to continue to work on comics, approached as the Walter Lehning publishing on it to a comic version of Winnetou create after the Karl May - Rights in 1962 had become free. Nickel worked for Walter Lehning Verlag until 1964, when the publisher delayed payments to him for months. This was also the end of his career as a comic artist. Nickel worked for the Metropolitan Museum until reaching retirement in 1989, after which he moved to Florida, where he died in June 2019 at the age of 95. In 2011 he was awarded PENG! For his life's work at the Munich comic festival . - The Munich Comic Prize awarded.

Nickel, who in an interview in the 1970s retrospectively referred to his work as " noble trash ", used the comics he designed to bring the reader closer to the culture and history of the respective historical locations on ethnographic excursions. According to Andreas C. Knigge , along with Hansrudi Wäscher, he had the greatest influence on German comics in the 1950s.

Publications

  • Introduction "Sword Magic and Sword Myth" in the second edition of Manfred Sachses "Damaszener Stahl", Verlag Stahleisen, 1993

literature

  • Eckart Sackmann : Helmut Nickel. In: RRAAH! Volume 15, No. 56, August 2001, ISSN  0933-601X , pp. 32-33
  • Andreas C. Knigge : Comic Lexicon . Ullstein Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin and Vienna 1988, ISBN 3-548-36554-X , pp. 343-344
  • Bernd Dolle-Weinkauff: Comics. History of a popular form of literature in Germany since 1945 , Beltz Verlag, Weinheim and Basel 1990, ISBN 3-407-56521-6 , p. 126ff
  • Andreas C. Knigge: To be continued. Comic culture in Germany , Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin and Vienna 1986, ISBN 3-548-36523-X , pp. 119f

Web links

Commons : Helmut Nickel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Eckart Sackmann: Helmut Nickel. In: RRAAH! Volume 15, No. 56, August 2001, ISSN  0933-601X , p. 32.
  2. ^ Gerhard Förster, Detlef Lorenz, Michael Hüster: Helmut Nickel died. In: ppm-vertrieb.de. June 14, 2019, accessed June 15, 2019 .
  3. ^ Andreas C. Knigge: Comic Lexikon . Ullstein Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin and Vienna 1988, ISBN 3-548-36554-X , p. 343.
personal data
SURNAME Nickel, Helmut
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Haffspoke, Hugh J. (pseudonym); Humbert, H. (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German art historian, comic artist and author
DATE OF BIRTH March 24, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Quohren near Dresden
DATE OF DEATH 5th June 2019
Place of death Naples , Florida